2018 Hellman Fellow

Assistant Professor, Environmental Science & PolicyUC Davis

Project Description: This is a project to improve dramatically the representation of ecological damages from climate change in the economic models used by the US government to analyze climate and energy policy. This will be done through a meta-analysis of a database of over 4,000 estimates of the ecosystem services provided by different land cover types, combined with existing ecological modeling results on changes in terrestrial vegetation cover to generate new, quantitative ‘damage functions’, the changes in economic welfare that result from warming. These damage functions will be introduced into economic models to calculate a new social cost of carbon, the external cost of a ton of CO2.